Home ›› 15 Jun 2023 ›› Opinion
Software industry is one of the vanguards of emerging modern economy. The estimated global economic market of this sector in 2023 is about 895 million USD, which will reach about 1590 million USD by 2028. At present, approximately 62 million professionals are working in the software sector worldwide, and most of them are software engineers or programmers.
Recently OpenAI’s artificial intelligence based chatbot Chat GPT appeared before us with the incredible power of the fourth industrial revolution. Many traditional professions are going to be threatened by the rise of Chat GPT. Goldman Sachs has shown in one of their studies that chat GPT and other artificial intelligence-based technologies will take away about 300 million jobs around the world. According to Business Insider in a report, among the ten professions that are most at risk due to chat GPT, software engineering or programming professions are in the first place.
The question is: How can Chat GPT become a threat to the software industry? Chat GPT’s greatest capability is that it can write code or program directly from human level language or our common usage language. This makes it easy to write code, solve errors or further optimize code using Chat GPT. This capability of Chat GPT increases the productivity of a software engineer or programmer manifold. By using artificial intelligence technology, a software engineer can easily become more productive than before, resulting in a software development in less time than before. This coupling of software engineers and artificial intelligence is now called ‘AI assisted development’.
This increase in productivity in the software sector can become a threat to software engineers or programmers in two ways. First, increased productivity means that a ten-person software engineering team can complete a task that previously took a month to complete in fifteen days. As a result of this, the creation of new jobs in the software sector will be relatively less in the future, and in some cases, the situation like layoffs or contraction of employment will also be created.
Second, while productivity gains may create opportunities to produce software in less time or with less manpower, new economic markets will not be created on a large scale. The largest market in the software sector is various types of enterprise software. The main users of such software are government and private organizations of various levels. Although the Fourth Industrial Revolution will greatly increase productivity and innovation in the economy, the market for enterprise software is unlikely to grow significantly. Consequently, even if the economic size of the software sector increases, conventional employment will not increase proportionally.
Chat GPT had one million users just five days after launch, Facebook had to wait ten months and Netflix almost three and a half years to get the same number of users. Chat GPT or similar artificial intelligence may be controversial in many quarters, but the skyrocketing number of users of Chat GPT around the world, its usability to the masses is telling us the story of success and future possibilities of artificial intelligence.
Artificial intelligence like Chat GPT may never become a complete substitute for software engineers or programmers, but it is easily conceivable that it will shrink the programming profession in the software sector through new dimensions of concepts like ‘AI assisted development’ or ‘prompt engineering’. The time for wishful thinking about artificial intelligence has already passed. For those who are not yet able to take appropriate policy decisions and steps to embrace the fourth industrial revolution, another story of inequality awaits them in the world to come.
The writer is an engineer
